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Just as cable and wireline telecommunications providers did before them, wireless network operators are getting smarter. They’re recognizing the need to make their networks smarter as well. Gone are the days of simply capping data and throttling traffic to deal with the insatiable bandwidth demand of subscribers. Now, wireless operators must implement innovative policies that enable them to deliver personalized services while differentiating themselves by providing the best possible end-user experience.
However, not all network intelligence is created equal. In fact, not all network intelligence “solutions” really solve anything. The savviest network operators recognize this trend; as the needs of their networks evolve, they understand the vital nature of scalability and real-time analytics.
“Information is cheap, lack of knowledge is expensive” is a mantra that mobile operators would be wise to repeat.
The right kind of intelligence leads to maturity, including in the tech markets. The primary element necessary for a mature market is an operator’s desire to move beyond providing basic bandwidth service to adding value to their connectivity. A key to providing valuable service is understanding how consumers are using their connectivity. For example, a user who streams videos has different expectations and different metrics for quality of experience than a user who is checking Facebook and Twitter. Understanding how users are consuming bandwidth and ensuring that the network is delivering a high QoE is the first step in that process.
This requires the ability to correlate traffic to subscribers, locations, devices and other subscriber attributes (like service plans) in order to create service plans that will be attractive to subscribers. If an operator does not understand the trends that are driving consumption on its network, it will likely miss the target with its network engineering, capacity planning, and even peering decisions. If the operator knows that streaming video is popular, but can’t see that it is Netflix traffic from a specific CDN that is suffering from packet loss, the operator may invest in the completely wrong engineering and marketing plans. Everyone knows that social networking is popular, but understanding the usage patterns for Facebook, Twitter, and 4Square ensures the ability to deliver high QoE for those services.
As a market matures, it begins to look beyond “feeds and speeds” to factors like operational readiness, ease of use, and service creation. Service creation for a mature market translates to evolving beyond simple byte counting to offering value-added service plans. These plans may be creative ways to deliver a high QoE for the subscriber’s preferred applications. For example, an operator can achieve this by charging less (or nothing) for certain applications with “Happy Hours” and “Nights and Weekend” plans, or even during all hours while employing different usage buckets for metered broadband services.
What does it take for an operator to deliver “mass market personalization” using intelligent policy enforcement? The three pillars of intelligent policy enforcement are awareness, analysis, and control. Solutions that lack any of these capabilities will limit the ability of an operator to deliver personalized services to its customers. Without all three components working together, operators will find themselves constrained by limitations like scalability, performance, granularity, or even constraints that are operational in nature. The more intelligent the solution, the easier it is to offer personalized services that stick.
Many pieces must to fall into place to deliver a personalized service:
1. A subscriber activates his or her device and attempts to access the network.
2. The network authenticates the subscriber and/or device to ensure that he is allowed access to the network.
3. Subscriber “service” must be determined and provisioned to the network. Provisioning may include bandwidth allowed, volume of data (either bulk or per service), priorities, security filters, value-added services, or even multi-device correlations. Depending on how the network is configured, this provisioning could be a single transaction to a single system, or many transactions to many systems (policy, charging, access, etc.). The subscriber must be associated with whatever “attributes” are necessary to deliver his purchased service to his devices.
4. The systems that have been provisioned with the service must enforce the service – bandwidth control, volume, filtering, traffic steering, congestion management – without degrading performance or scalability or stability so that the system is cost-effective.
5. The systems must perform network and business intelligence gathering on all traffic to feed the analytics systems for future service development. The more information that can be collected, the more valuable the data is for the operator. This data must be collected with as small of an interval as possible because the longer the interval, the more the operator loses granularity. For example, spikes in bandwidth and latency can be smoothed out over long intervals, and the operator would miss them.
6. If volume/event-based charging or CDR/UDR generation is required, every charging event results in a transaction with the charging infrastructure, and especially at session closing time.
7. In a network where phones go into an “idle” mode or where subscriber movement between locations is tracked, every time this happens, it can result in more transactions.
Of course, the more services an operator offers, the harder the network must strain.
To accomplish personalized services across an intelligent network requires extensive capabilities. Mature customers understand the challenges and are more discerning about what systems they choose. They understand the weaknesses and breakpoints of solutions, and take a “whole product” point of view when they evaluate solutions.
This mature market naturally desires for this process to be easy, a market that employs, what I dub “radical simplicity.” Networks are radically simple when carrier-grade IPE solutions do not have to be managed by acolytes of technology that speak or program arcane languages.
The combination of performance, scalability, and ease-of-use will take intelligent policy enforcement to mass-market deployments for operators of all sizes. Operators that are forced to wait nine months for a service launch to capitalize on a new trend will find that the trend is no longer hot. Operators that must plan for a performance or scalability reduction for every new service they launch will quickly find their solutions very capital intensive and inefficient indeed.
Quite simply, operators that cannot deliver scalability for personalized services will be unable to grow their business.
